(1) Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to methods of processing piezoceramic transducer arrays, and more particularly to a new method for processing piezoceramic acoustic transducer arrays based on the mosaic arranging of piezoceramic materials with urethane.
(2) Description of the Prior Art
Piezoceramic acoustic transducer material has found its applications in underwater acoustic sonar transducers and arrays and has shown promising performance.
Currently, the great majority of the sonar transducer arrays are composed of piezoceramic transducer elements that are identical with respect to their physical sizes, to their shapes and to the type of materials used to manufacture them. The advantage of maintaining uniform size, shape and material is to maintain control in the quality of the transducer characteristics. There is, however, a disadvantage in maintaining a rigid uniformity. The trade-off is a loss in the flexibility of sonar array design that is limited to specific shapes and sizes.
There is a need for a new method of manufacturing underwater acoustic transducer arrays. Such a method should provide the means to manufacture piezoceramic transducer arrays with predetermined specific attributes and performance expectations. It should encompass any arbitrary surface geometry possible using numerical simulation techniques, and should not be restricted to only certain shapes of piezoceramic materials in order to optimize the acoustical performance in a controllable fashion when such piezoceramic materials are at the preliminary stage of manufacturing the transducer array. What is needed is a mosaic process for the fabrication of acoustic transducer arrays.